Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Parisian Art Scene: How to Become a Brazilian Musician*

1 Mana vol.1 no.se Rio de Janeiro Oct. 2006 Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Parisian art scene: how to become a Brazilian musician* Paulo Renato Guérios Master’s in Social Anthropology at PPGAS/Museu Nacional/UFRJ, currently a doctoral student at the same institution ABSTRACT This article discusses how the flux of cultural productions between centre and periphery works, taking as an example the field of music production in France and Brazil in the 1920s. The life trajectories of Jean Cocteau, French poet and painter, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, a Brazilian composer, are taken as the main reference points for the discussion. The article concludes that social actors from the periphery tend themselves to accept the opinions and judgements of the social actors from the centre, taking for granted their definitions concerning the criteria that validate their productions. Key words: Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazilian Music, National Culture, Cultural Flows In July 1923, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos arrived in Paris as a complete unknown. Some five years had passed since his first large-scale concert in Brazil; Villa-Lobos journeyed to Europe with the intention of publicizing his musical output. His entry into the Parisian art world took place through the group of Brazilian modernist painters and writers he had encountered in 1922, immediately before the Modern Art Week in São Paulo. Following his arrival, the composer was invited to a lunch in the studio of the painter Tarsila do Amaral where he met up with, among others, the poet Sérgio Milliet, the pianist João de Souza Lima, the writer Oswald de Andrade and, among the Parisians, the poet Blaise Cendrars, the musician Erik Satie and the poet and painter Jean Cocteau. After the lunch, the artists became engrossed in a lively conversation which drifted into a discussion on the art of musical improvisation. Villa-Lobos, who had already composed an extensive repertoire of piano solos, then sat down to Tarsila’s Erard concerto to improvise. Immediately, Jean Cocteau, known for his boutades and his playful behaviour, sat underneath the piano on the ground, “so he could hear better.” At the end of Villa-Lobos’s improvisation, however, Cocteau returned to his chair and launched a ferocious attack on what he had heard: in his opinion, the music presented by the composer was no more than an emulation of the styles of Debussy and Ravel. Villa-Lobos * I am grateful for the suggestions of Prof. Lygia Sigaud and the two anonymous readers who reviewed this article. Responsibility for its content remains entirely my own. 2 immediately began another improvisation; Cocteau, though, remained intransigent, questioning this time whether an improvisation could be made in this way, played to order. The two artists began a heated discussion and came close to exchanging blows.1 This encounter can be taken as a defining moment in the twist taken by the personal and artistic career of Villa-Lobos as a result of his stay in Paris: it was only after this trip that he began to focus his efforts on producing a national form of music. The present article attempts to comprehend why this twist occurred at this moment and why Villa-Lobos’s artistic project assumed this specific content thereafter. What the described event marks is a moment where an expectation is shattered: the composer, who expected to become a big success in the French capital, had his art rejected by one of the most important figures from the city’s artistic scene. An event such as this is criss-crossed by innumerable social vectors. On one hand, a foreign artist, fresh from the ‘periphery,’ a recent arrival in the great cultural centre of the period; on the other, a Parisian artist completely established and at home in his setting. More than a purely aesthetic question, therefore, a whole series of cultural contents, legitimacies, representations and hierarchies was at stake. Hence, in order for us to understand not just this encounter but also Villa-Lobos’s stay in Paris, we need to explore carefully the sociohistorical configuration in which both occurred. My intention, though, is not to trace a global ‘context’ in which these figures were ‘immersed.’ Such an approach would impoverish the analytic possibilities, since as Bensa argues (1998:46), “context is immanent to practices and makes up part of them.” Instead, we shall focus on the practices and relations established between the different social actors involved, determining through empirical research their social properties, aspirations and the moment they were passing through in their life histories. This analysis will serve as a starting point for us to focus on a broader subject. In fact, the study of the careers of the figures involved allows us to discuss the way in which cultural flows between centre and periphery work, taking as an example the musical scenes of France and Brazil in the 1920s. With the help of this empirical material, we can identify the social practices and mechanisms through which the social positions of these figures were supported and their differences legitimized. I shall start the article by sketching Heitor Villa-Lobos’s career up until his encounter with Cocteau in Paris. Subsequently, I focus on the transformation in his conceptions of Brazilian music and his own work during his stay in the French capital. Finally, I discuss the social mechanisms and practices through which this transformation took place. Heitor Villa-Lobos, a carioca composer In March 1887, when Heitor Villa-Lobos was born, many things were about to change in his home city, Rio de Janeiro. A weak and aged emperor was the sole guardian of a system of government which had proven to be dysfunctional for a number of years. A little more than two years later, the emperor and his family were banished and Brazil was proclaimed a Republic. The transition to the new form of government had a pronounced impact on the arts: the imagination linked to liberty and modernity, so widespread in the first years after the proclamation, created a favourable environment for changes in aesthetic alignments. In the field of classical music, some artists took advantage of this opportunity to effect a sweeping restructuration of the country’s largest 3 school of music: less than two months after the end of the Empire, a decree transformed the Imperial Music Conservatory into the National Institute of Music. This change of name signalled a desire for deeper changes. In fact, until then, the classical music produced in Brazil had circulated exclusively in Court circles. It was in 1841 that Francisco Manuel da Silva “put before the throne” a request for the creation of the Imperial Conservatory, a ‘civilizing environment’ that could place Brazil in the ensemble of the “most cultured nations” (Mello 1947 [1908]:219). Before this, the classical music produced in Brazil was for all intents confined to music for ecclesiastical functions, composed by chapel masters such as Marcos Portugal and Father José Maurício. The Imperial Conservatory, however, never succeeded in consolidating itself as an institution; indeed, it lost its institutional space when it became subordinated to the School of Fine Arts in 1855. The Empire also supported the creation of the Imperial Academy of National Music and Opera by Dom José Amat, a Spanish immigrant who began to implement his project in 1857, attempting to establish a field for the creation of ‘national’ Brazilian operas. In practice, the ‘national’ element of the works presented at the Imperial Academy was almost entirely restricted to the use of the Portuguese language in translated versions of operas such as Norma and La Traviatta — but since the singers of the main roles of the presentations of the Imperial Academy were almost always foreigners, even the ‘Portuguese’ they sang was incomprehensible to the audience (Azevedo 1938:592). In fact, the pre-eminence of the Italian aesthetic in Brazil during the years of Empire was so accentuated that the debate among critics concerning the first opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, A Noite do Castello, was over the suitability or otherwise of the composer freeing himself from the influence of Verdi to absorb the aesthetic of Rossini and Donizetti. The only big name in Brazilian classical music at the time, Carlos Gomes opened his biggest success, the opera Il Guarany, sung in Italian, at the Scala Theatre in Milan (Azevedo 1936:208). When the composer Leopoldo Miguéz took over the direction of the then National Institute of Music, in 1890, he made a point of imposing a ‘modern’ aesthetic in contrast to the ‘conservatism’ reigning there on his arrival. For Miguéz, ‘modern’ meant the German aesthetic of Wagner and the French aesthetic of Saint-Saëns, while ‘conservatism’ meant the insistence on privileging the Italian bel canto; at another level, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Miguéz and the Republic were the modernity that came to substitute Verdi, the Conservatory and the emperor, a musical echo of the urban and ideological reforms through which the capital of the Republic was passing. Hence, social and political values were attributed to a form of cultural objectification that, at first sight, seems alien to these disputes: musical aesthetics. The ‘updating’ proposed by Miguéz for the Brazilian classical music scene was in equal measure aesthetic and moral. On the day after his nomination as director of the Institute, Miguéz abolished the Chair of Singing “due to a lack of teachers,” despite the large number of teachers in Italian bel canto working there. Qualified piano teachers who belonged to the same aesthetic were replaced or downgraded to lower posts, such as that of accompanist. Miguéz’s actions led to the formation of an opposing group to Rio de Janeiro’s newly constituted musical establishment; as a result of these events, aesthetic debate on classical music in Rio de Janeiro became polarized between Italian music and that of Richard Wagner.

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